In Sendak’s world, childhood was beautiful, but it could also be scary, confusing and sometimes horrible. He had little time for sanitized cuteness and lighthearted naiveté.

“As a parent, I read Where the Wild Things Are to my children,” said The Graveyard Book author Neil Gaiman in an e-mail exchange with Wired. “But [my daughter] Holly’s favorite was Outside, Over There, and I must have read it to her hundreds of times, perhaps thousands of times, marveling at Sendak’s economy of words, his cruelty, his art.”